Empowering Children with Autism at School – the role of vocabulary skills

Dr. Purnama Sari explains how the method of “propensity score matching” (PSM) aids the understanding of neurodiversity in the classroom. Her study unravelled that vocabulary skills contribute to academic skills in autistic children, and not their gestational age, sex, birth weight, age, ethnicity, parental income, parental education, mother’s IQ, mother’s autistic traits, or mother’s depression score. This blog post may empower children with autism and their parents.

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How to navigate the knowledge explosion in mental health research

Solomiia gives an inside on “new” ways of organizing knowledge by building a database on the entire research domain, in her case, on the topic of daily life stress and mental health. She first presents a rationale as to why having a database of empirical articles would benefit the field of psychological science followed by a more detailed example of her work in which she explains how she plans to build a database on daily life stress and mental health research.

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Capturing the dynamics of learning and forgetting through adaptive retrieval practice

Across virtually all levels and topics of education, students need to learn facts. The SlimStampen algorithm, developed at the UG, aims to optimize the process of fact learning. PhD student Thomas Wilschut explains how the algorithm works, what it tells us, and how future work (including his own) can improve it.

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The Flow of Life: It Matters What You Do Before Arriving

Setting goals efficiently drives long-term goal pursuit, but it also facilitates the experience of flow states – such an intense focus on the present activity that goals, as future-oriented objects, lose importance and experience becomes deeply meaningful. Metaphorically, what makes a journey meaningful is not its destination, but the process itself.

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Let’s write about sex and gender

Why and how do you measure sex or gender in your research participants? Are you still using a single binary question (male/female), or do you still add the option “other”? Are you aware of the differences between sex and gender? This blog post provides some hands-on best practices tips for including sex and/or gender in your research and for writing about them in an inclusive way.

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